Midnight Hours
by ObliviousTrace
Summary: Pansy smokes to relax. She ignores her memories to survive. She sleeps with Ron because something has to pierce through the pain.


Midnight Hours

"It's a filthy habit."

"It relaxes me."

"You reek of it."

To spite him, Pansy releases a long slow puff of smoke directly into his face. The redhead doesn't flinch, but she sees his blue eyes water slightly.

"I thought sex relaxed you."

"It does. But when I'm not having sex, I need to smoke."

Ron glares at her, but she ignores it. She tugs the sheet tighter around her chest and takes another drag on her cigarette. She's not sure why she suddenly becomes self-conscious once they stop making love, but she refuses to let him see her naked until they start again.

His hand reaches out to play casually with her dark hair and she flinches. Pansy isn't used to tenderness, and Ron usually doesn't show it. She's familiar with rage and control. Her body responds naturally to the handling she got from Draco, to vicious fights and animalistic sex. Soft caresses make her knees weak and her throat burn. She isn't sure she likes it.

Ron (or Weasley as she still calls him, just to see his face redden) isn't the same as he was before the war. Hardly surprising, considering his frequent visits to the former Slytherin's bed. Pansy knows that the death of his sister scarred him worse than he lets on. His kisses are possessive and full of an anger and a sorrow that threatens to burn her. They don't seem like the ones he gave to Granger or Lovegood before the war, shy and tentative. The lopsided smile he is so famous for never shows up in her sterile apartment.

Pansy sighs slightly and relaxes back into the pillows. Her thighs are sore, like they always are, and she is tired in more ways than one. She feels him breathing gently next to her and resists the urge to grab his hand. She refuses to meet his piercing blue eyes, afraid that she'll see steel grey peering out.

She glances around her and sees her clothes and his, strewn haphazardly around the room. Their wands lie forgotten near the door. Even from the bed Pansy can see that his robes are frayed and patched, just like hers. The clock on the wall reads fifteen past midnight.

"Why are you here?" She asks, as usual. As usual, he shakes his head.

"Why did you kill him?" The same answer, given at the same time every night. Pansy jabs the stub of her cigarette into the ash tray on her bedstead. She watches her blood-red nails grind the paper and tobacco into the smoldering remains of weeks of sex and conversation.

That should be the end. The silence should stretch until he gets up and gets dressed and gets the hell out of her life for another few hours. But this time, her lip quavering and her chin jutting determinedly, she turns back to face him. Ron's eyes widen slightly in surprise.

"I saw her today, you know. Walking in Diagon Alley, hand in hand with Potter." She feels, rather than sees, the breath stop in his throat. Pansy smiles a slow, vindictive smile and hates the plaster sense of it on her face. "Did you know that, Weasley? Did you know that she's working her way through your friends, one by one? Finnegan, Thomas, Longbottom, Creevey, it's all the same to her." His eyes are closed now and she knows its hurting him. She just can't stop.

"Did you know that while you were with me tonight, she was probably with him? Moaning his name and kissing his neck and scratching his back with her ink-stained nails? Your virginal Hermione moving under your best friend, while you were here with me?" Her words are more painful than his touches.

His eyes snap open and the grey filling the blue is so intense she stifles a scream. He grabs her wrists and flips her onto her back, pinning her struggling form under him. Ron's mouth ravages hers and she starts to cry, so slowly, with every tear that she's always wanted to shed for the past ten years and never has. He nips at her skin while she begins to sob for her parents, for herself, for her addictions, and most of all for Draco and the man on top of her who is beginning to resemble him.

Ron lets out a strangled gasp and rolls off of her, burying his face in the sheets. Pansy can't stop crying now, her body racking and shaking as all the hurts of her life since she was eleven flood back into her and out of her eyes. She remembers the silver-eyed boy that became an obsession and then an enemy and then a sin. She remembers fallen friends and past comrades and gazing at the bodies of people she once thought she hated. She remembers the night in the bar over two months ago, when she tried to stain her mind with alcohol and when the familiar redhead that she had always known but never actually _knew_ stopped her with his kisses. She remembers it all and finally lets the walls shatter.

Eventually, the violent, choking tears slow and stop altogether. Pansy becomes aware of a different weight on the bed than her own and the stifled tears of another.

She slides over to Ron and, with murmured words and soft caresses, lifts his face up. Her arms enfold him and after a moment his trembling form clings to her. His face burrows into her neck and her fingers entangle in his sweaty hair.

She whispers nonsense in his ear and lets the sheet fall away.


End file.
